Jacqui Hurley: My parents ran one of those houses where the door was always open

The sports presenter on her early childhood in Australia, her lifelong love of sport, and how her parents instilled in her a lust for life and an openness to making the most of opportunities

Jacqui Hurley recalls her teenage years as being 'busy but happy, with sport being the main focus of every day. Picture: Moya Nolan

Jacqui Hurley is grateful to her parents for opening her eyes to the world and all its opportunities. In the recessionary 1980s' Ireland, Dave and Máiréad Hurley packed up their lives in Cork and moved to the other side of the globe with their three young children.

“Mam was a nurse and Dad was an electrician and they’d been offered jobs in Australia,” says the RTÉ sports broadcaster and TV presenter. 

Mam had never even been on a plane and they had three kids under four. But they wanted a better life. Their plan was to stay in Australia for a few years. They loved it so much we stayed for seven.

Her earliest memory is of the goodbyes at the airport. She was only three and remembers feeling “upset and sad but excited too. Everyone was hugging us and telling us they wouldn’t see us for years, but we kids were delighted at the thought of flying in a plane.”

The life that awaited them in Australia was a happy one. Hurley says her parents “ran one of those houses where the door was always open, and people constantly dropped by”.

Both Hurley’s parents played and watched a lot of sports and their children followed their example. “It was a sociable thing,” she says. 

“We’d play as a family and we’d play with other kids. I always found sports a great way of making friends, and from a young age, I did athletics, played soccer and netball. We also had a massive green in our cul-de-sac where all the neighbourhood kids would play cricket.”

The young Hurley was also an outgoing and performative child. She says her parents have since told her how she “used to cut holes in cardboard boxes and put them on my head so that I could pretend I was reading the sports news to everyone”.

As the middle child, she was close to both her siblings but says they would often squabble. “Tríona is 15 months older than me, and Seán [who was killed in a car accident when he was 24] was two years younger. Any two of us together was fine but as soon as the third was thrown into the mix, there would be fights.”

Jacqui Hurley with her mother Máiréad, sister Tríona and brother Seán outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, in 1990.

After seven years in Australia, Hurley’s mother felt it was time to go home. “She was worried about her parents getting older and us not getting the chance to know them,” says Hurley. “So we came back when I was 10.”

The children returned with Australian accents, which led to teasing at school. However, two things helped them to win the other children over.

One was the Australian soap Home and Away, which Hurley says was “all the rage in 1990s Ireland”. The storylines in Australia were six months ahead, so she and her siblings were “like Mystic Meg — everyone came to us for the goss on what was going to happen with Shane and Angel”.

Sport was the other bridge. At her new primary school in Ballinhassig, Cork, Hurley played football, camogie, and basketball, and says, “sport once again helped me make friends”.

It also opened up other opportunities. Hurley played on the Irish basketball team and played camogie for Cork. Looking back, she recalls her teenage years as being “busy but happy, with sport being the main focus of every day”.

It was during those years she began to consider a career in sports journalism. For a while, her mother had been convinced she would become a concert pianist. “She’d gone to a clairvoyant at some stage who had told her I’d be a performer, and because I played piano then, that’s what she thought I’d be,” says Hurley.

“But I had no interest in that. I ended up performing in a different way, a way that’s closer to what I was doing as a little girl with that cardboard box on my head.”

Her career guidance teacher at school initially tried to dissuade her from her chosen career path, suggesting she apply for a PE teaching course instead. “I’m sure she only wanted the best for me as there weren’t many women in sports journalism in those days,” says Hurley. “But I was adamant and applied for media and English at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.”

Her parents supported her choice. She says they “instilled a belief in all of us that we could do whatever we wanted to do. 

Tríona is a pilot with British Airways. Before he died, Seán was about to become a semi-professional motorbike racer. I’m a TV presenter. None of those is an easy career, but they always encouraged us.

Hurley now sees her family’s move to Australia as an example of her parents’ commitment to providing their children with opportunities. “They upended their whole lives for us then and didn’t stop there,” she says. “They constantly spoke to us about the possibilities available to us and how we could make the most of them.”

It was that attitude that spurred Hurley onwards when she left home to go to college at the age of 18. She had “mixed emotions because Tríona had gone to college in Cork and still lived at home. But the course I wanted to do wasn’t available in Cork, so I had to go for it”.

Hurley now lives in Dublin with her husband Shane McMahon and their two children, Luke (12) and Lily (8). She tries to instil the same attitude in them that her parents instilled in her. 

“The world is a much smaller place for them than it was for us when we went to Australia in the 1980s, but it’s still as full of possibilities,” she says. 

“I learned a lust for living and an openness to the opportunities of the world from my parents and I’d love my kids to have that too.”